The best sites for sharing and promoting your articles

Updated on February 15, 2012

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It is very satisfying to write a good article for the internet, and HubPages allows us to do this as part of a great writing community, full of writers that actively support and encourage each other. We work hard on our writing, researching our topics, perfecting our text and making our hubs look beautiful, so we want to share our work with as large an audience as possible.

It is fantastic the way fellow writers read and comment on each others work on HubPages, but once you have shared your work with your followers you really want to share it with the rest of the world, and hopefully make all your hard work pay off with a little advertising revenue to put in the bank.

I have done a few experiments with social networking sites and sharing sites to see which ones produce the greatest number of hits, and would like to share my observations with you.

At the bottom of your hub you will find the black "Share" button (see screen shot above), which allows you to share your article either with your HubPages followers, or on various sites such as Facebook, Twitter etc. You do need to register for an account with all of these sites in order to use them, but they are all free to join. The following sections describe my own experience.

Twitter

Posting to Twitter, or "tweeting", as users call it, will put a link to your article onto your profile. It will appear as part of a continuous stream of tweets that your Twitter followers can see, but as time goes by and more tweets appear, your link will disappear slowly off the bottom of the page. The more followers you have the more people are likely to see it, providing they are logged on at the time, or look directly at your profile to see what your last few tweets were. For Twitter to have any serious impact on your hub views you need to have a lot of dedicated followers who are really interested in what you have to say. Personally I have just over 80 followers, very few of whom I know personally, and my hit rate so far is usually between 0 and 3 page views per tweet.

Facebook

Again, the success of sharing on Facebook depends on the number of your Facebook friends, and how interested they are in reading your articles. I am reluctant to spam my friends and family on Facebook, so very rarely post a link there. When I have it has generated maybe half a dozen page views, but I prefer to use it sparingly because people get fed up with constant self-promotion!

Stumbleupon

This is a site where you can recommend pages, and users can find your post by searching for subjects in which they are interested. Users are also sent emails with recommendations every so often, so if you are lucky your pages might reach large numbers of people. So far I have shared nine of my hubs, and had 45 page views in the space of a month.

Reddit

I didn't know anything about Reddit until quite recently, after reading one hubber's experience of getting something like 3000 hits from one post, so I decided it was worth a try! I have posted 3 articles to Reddit, one article has not been viewed at all, but the other two have had 105 page views between them in just four days. This has been by far my greatest success story. I think the trick is to find out what Reddit users enjoy reading about the most, and to make sure you list your article under the correct subject matter (subreddit) to ensure you reach the most interested readers.

Summary

After the HubPages community, my vote goes to Reddit as the best networking site for promoting and sharing your Hubs!

Notes

The numbers of page views given above were found from the stats at the top of each article, where the author can view a breakdown of traffic sources, amongst other things. You can find a breakdown of your total traffic sources on your "My account" page, and choose the Traffic Sources tab on the left hand side. I have found this information quite enlightening and it is helpful in deciding on the best way to promote each article depending on subject matter and target audience. I have been writing in my spare time on HubPages for 7 months, and have published just over 30 articles to date, so I am still learning the techniques for search engine optimisation and self-promotion, but every little thing I discover helps that little bit more!

I hope this information was useful to you, and if you have had any interesting experiences with sharing your hubs I would be most interested to hear about them - please leave a comment below.

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Comments 27 comments

I rarely get any views from sharing my hubs and I really didtry! I have pretty much given up, it seems like too much effort for too little gain. Glad to hear that you gaining traffic from Reddit.

Interesting hub, voted up.

Imogen French 4 years ago from Southwest England Author

thanks Judi Bee. I've pretty much given up on the other sites, but might persist with Reddit for a while.

Jessi10 4 years ago from Lancaster, CA

Thank you for this HUb. I've tried the sites that you mentioned, and they do work. But you also have to remember, that most writers on here also write about business. You might want to add Linkedin to this article. That is one of my biggest sources of traffic for my work!

Great hub! VOTED UP!

Imogen French 4 years ago from Southwest England Author

thanks for your comment Jessi - that's a good bit of advice for the more business-oriented among us. (I'm still at the writing for fun and pocket-money stage, lol!)

sgbrown 4 years ago from Southern Oklahoma

Great information! Your statistics are interesting. I have been doing well with sharing my hubs with my followers. I have seen quite a bit of traffic from that. I do pretty well with StumbleUpon. I was doing a little with my blog, but haven't been sharing there alot since they took off the EBlog on our share button. Not sure whey that happened. I think I will try Redit. Thank you for this information! Voted up and useful.

theinfoplanet 4 years ago from The Planet of Information

I have used stumbleupon for about 2 of my hubs, but I will give reddit a shot. I usually have no hope of gaining traffic from social networking sites, but you have sparked me to try:) Voted up.

dilipchandra12 4 years ago from India

Am hardly getting any traffic form sites like digg, reddit. But, would like to give a try again.

Imogen French 4 years ago from Southwest England Author

thanks for all your comments, and I wish you all the best of luck - it's definitely worth a try!

Barbara Kay 4 years ago from USA

Redgage has worked well for me.

modgirlok 4 years ago from Oklahoma

Useful and informative.Voting up.

Healthy Pursuits 4 years ago from Oregon

You need to be very careful about posting your own work - in your username - to Reddit. While they say an occasional self post is fine, they don't really like it. I do get traffic from Reddit. But I use it only a little so I won't get in trouble there, and I use an alternate username. I also make sure to post other people's writing, so I have a variety of posts. It's also a good thing to help other hubbers.

Imogen French 4 years ago from Southwest England Author

Thanks for the advice, healthy pursuits. I have found that subsequent postings on Reddit have not been as successful as my earlier attempts. I do agree that we should help other hubbers by sharing their best articles - it's all in the spirit of HubPages! thanks for reading and commenting :)

MelChi 4 years ago from Cape Town, South Africa

Thanks for the tips!

Sherry Hewins 4 years ago from Sierra Foothills, CA

My experience is similar to yours. I have some supportive friends on facebook, I always post a new hub there and usually get about 25 immediate views and many of them will share, so sometimes it grows into more. I got over 600 views in 4 days when I posted to Reddit, but since that initial success I've found that their spam filter won't allow me to post in most subreddits there. I just discovered yesterday that there is a subreddit just for hubs, but it seem seldom used. It's called thehubhub. The hub I submitted is still sitting there waiting for moderation.

rasta1 4 years ago from Jamaica

These are basically the only bookmarking sites that really count.

Koshaugh 4 years ago from Indianapolis

This was helpful. Thanks for sharing!

Imogen French 4 years ago from Southwest England Author

You're welcome Koshaugh. This hub should probably be updated soon to reflect the new layout of sharing options here on Hubpages - and should include Pinterest. I haven't used it yet though, so need to do a little research first.

lrc7815 4 years ago from Central Virginia

Nice hub with useful information. I have been reluctant to share my hubs on Facebook, preferring to keep my acccount there personal. I enjoy the freedom of expression that Hubpages provides me and not all my friends on Facebook will appreciate my views. I don't want my Facebook timeline to become a breeding ground for argument. I will give Reddit a try. Thanks for a great, informative Hub.

Green Art 4 years ago

This hub has been very helpful and given me some good ideas on how to promote my hubs. I'm looking forward to trying the Reddit site . Voted UP!

Lybrah 4 years ago

What is Reddit?

Imogen French 4 years ago from Southwest England Author

Hi Lybrah, Reddit is another user-generated website where members can post links to articles etc. It used to be included under the old "Share" button on HubPages articles, along with StumbleUpon, but these seem to have disappeared and been replaced by Pinterest now. You can still upload to these other sites if you are a member.

Lybrah 4 years ago

Thanks!

dontaytte 4 years ago from Palos Hills

Nice hub. I'm new to HP, but the two best sites that have worked for me are stumble and Google +. Stumble gives you a good boost for the first two or three days that you link your post. I try to use them about a day or so after the HP traffic dies down.

BlondieKayla19 4 years ago

Thanks for this! I'm new and just starting out here. Any advice would be great! I have twitter and will start posting it on there!

janshares 4 years ago from Washington, DC

Hi Imogene,

I hopped over here from a question because I liked your suggestion about supporting each other to increase traffic. I'm so glad I came and found this very useful hub. Thank you for the advice. I use twitter, facebook, and email. I always ask my followers to retweet and that has helped, as well as asking my friends to forward my email. I will check out Reddit. Voted up and useful.

Imogen French 4 years ago from Southwest England Author

Hi Jan, thanks for commenting. Hope this hub was useful, and thanks for your tips too. I have recently started to use Pinterest, but not really had much feedback from it yet. We shall see on that one. I have also started a recipe and food blog, linking back to some of my recipes on here, but that is struggling a bit too! Oh well, it all helps. :)

I think the support hubbers give each other is truly valuable, and find this is a great site for that reason.

Saloca 3 years ago from Liverpool, UK

Pinterest has worked wonders for my articles - one of which gets almost 3000 hits a week through Pinterest alone! I'd say it's well worth looking into!